Question

Let’s say that I’m doing an Android project at the office, and that it is not just a hobby project, and that it is actually intended to be released and mass distributed. Would there be anything crippling about using the Android command line tools to manage the project, and just ignoring Eclipse? They describe here how to manage projects on the command line:

http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/projects/projects-cmdline.html

However, I can’t get a feel for if those tools are production quality or not. Basically, I’m afraid that if I use the command line tools then somewhere down the line I’ll have to do task “X”, only to find out that task “X” is basically impossible or insanely difficult without Eclipse. Are there any such task X’s? Or are the Android command line project tools actually viable for commercial projects?

I already know that you won’t have a GUI designer, but I’m not that crazy about the GUI designer in Eclipse anyway. I constantly find myself pressing “Run Project” to debug my GUIs on the actual device anyway (layout preview be damned).

As for debugging, for the limited amount of debugging I do command line jdb is adequate, even if not always completely pleasant. And I bet I could set up a GUI debugger if I really had to.

The question is, are there any problems that would be considered effectively insurmountable without Eclipse? Or are there just minor annoyances that can be easily worked around (like the two I just mentioned above).

I realize that stack overflow isn’t meant for discussion questions, and this question might seem like just that, but I think it doesn’t have to be. If there really is something gigantically terrible about not using Eclipse, someone will mention it, and I’ll give them the green check mark. If there isn’t, then perhaps someone can point me to examples of existing large projects that use the command line tools instead of Eclipse, and I’ll give that the green check mark instead.

Answer 1

Many people use Ant to build Android projects from the command line. Actually, in my opinion this is the preferred way, since it allows you to check everything that you need into a source control system and get predictable and repeatable builds every time.

So, the answer is “Yes”! Take a look at Using Ant to Automate Building Android article for more in-depth explanation how you manage this. Of course, using Eclipse is very convenient, but you don’t really need it to build Android applications.